Was it like a human egg and, er... a set of divine chromesomes or what? I bet some church scholar has talked about that more than any person reasonably should, it's entirely possible that got transcribed and computerized.
The Biblical texts don't comment, so I don't think many church scholars should comment on it, either. It appears to be pretty clearly stated that she was a virgin... that was the whole point of the visits to Joseph by angels, etc.
Just random though (I'm not a "church scholar," so I can comment! hehe) - if God is Biblically able to create the entire world, I'm pretty sure He would be able to fertilize a human egg (and give it actual human chromosomes) without needing one of His created men involved. If you believe in any sort of Deity that can do supernatural things, it should not be difficult to believe in a supernatural "fertilization," it seems. The part that the Bible claims that people have difficulty believing is the part about being fully divine and fully human and without sin.
by using parts of the bible people don't quote to justify slavery, stoning, and killing. As part of the essay, it uses Old Testament text that seems to justify owning slaves as long as they are not from your own country.
There are reasons for that. It's called "context."
If you want to argue whether or not slavery has ever been ok according to the Bible, that's one thing; if you want to apply what laws that the Bible states were given to a particular nation at a particular time in history for a very specific purpose to current nations and thus show how the Bible condones modern day slavery, then you have major contextual issues. It would be similar to me taking a quote from a 3rd century Greek philosopher about how Greeks back then should dress for war, applying it to modern warfare, and claiming "how stupid Greek philosophy was! They expected people to fight in their tanks with skirts!" Or whatever.
In general, I would tend to actually agree. I disagree very strongly with Obama, but I also strongly disagree with many Republicans and conservatives in the very disrespectful way they treat him - the same disagreement I had with the many Democrats and liberals that treated Bush with the same disrespect. And hatred (on both sides/both Presidents). Obama appears to be pretty decent in his own personal actions, but I think he chooses to align himself with people that are much less dignified than he is.
And he does seem to have a tendency to not give straight/honest answers all the time, tailoring his speech and tailoring the facts to those he is talking to (e.g., his speech in Cairo). Which is more an indictment against all politicians, not just Obama... but he raised the bar on himself by claiming to be above that and wanting to change it, etc.
As an aside, I happen to think this whole idea of bipartisanship is, at this point, completely absurd.
I'm really ok with non-bipartisanship, to some extent. But at least say you're not interested in it, don't try to say one thing and do another (not talking to you... talking to Washington. Who isn't reading. hehe.)
I simply don't think there *can* be any kind of bipartisan effort between the Democrats and the Republicans, simply because they're so distant ideologically.
I would tend to agree.
tearing the Democrats from power. And if that means blocking any and all attempts and meaningful reform, then so be it.
And again, I agree. Same that Democrats wanted to do. Power-struggle, pretty much, on both sides. However, I think that the current "meaningful reform" is actually bad, not good, so I'll side with Republicans at the moment.
Much like our good friend Rush Limbaugh, I really believe the Republicans hope Obama and the Democrats fail and fail miserably, regardless of the consequences it may have for America.
Limbaugh, IMO, is very smart, very arrogant, and can be very annoying (to both sides). I'm not sure most Republicans/conservatives hope Obama fails. However, I think a lot of Republicans/conservatives think that the policies Obama/Democrats are trying to put in place are bad, and thus would rather have the current administration and Congress fail sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately, I think the sentiment often goes way too far... in that the "consequences it may have for America" are forgotten and it becomes an us-vs.-them mentality. Which is not good... and IMO, until we get honest politicians (oxymoron alert), we're going to continue to have power-struggles and corruption instead of actual good representation. I don't think the current administration nor the current Congress, for the most part - on both sides - has the non-corrupted decent-person honesty.
Anyway, to answer the charge against "Republicans" personally - I don't hope "Obama and the Democrats" (sounds like a movie, hehe) fail... but I think their policies will or would fail, and thus I would like it to happen quicker rather than later/drawn-out, if at all. I also don't think Obama is a good leader. Good PR, good campaigner, and maybe even a pretty decent guy - I don't know him personally, obviously... but I don't think he is particularly good at making hard decisions unless it gets support from everyone. If he had to make the "right choice" even if it meant being unpopular, I am not sure he would. And I don't think I agree with what he thinks is right oftentimes, either.
As for Democrats in Congress, I think most of them are pretty much bought by lobbyists. We were promised, by Obama, no pork/less-spending/more-accountability and we're getting the same amount of pork, more spending, and a lot of "czars" that don't appear to be very accountable to anyone.
So, Republicans can only propose minor details, not large changes? If Republicans want, say, investigation into nuclear energy but Democrats don't, they aren't allowed to suggest it - it's too big of a change? Or too complex? Or whatever?
It seems that most of the current bills are very ideologically Democrat centered. Public healthcare and climate change stuff (but not nuclear, it seems). As I recall, House Republicans/conservatives submitted a lot of proposals from the so-called tort reform to abortion to making sure illegal immigrants don't get the public healthcare insurance option. None of them - and those are not "major" in comparison with the bill - were accepted.
Meanwhile, the Democrats have been folding on some of their core proposals in order to get things moving (a public healthcare option being the most glaring).
They folded on that? It's still in almost all of their bills, if not all of them, and it is one of the major things that many people don't want. As you mention, "60%" of the US population supports... what? Supports healthcare reform or supports the current bills, as they are, in the House, including the public option? There's a huge difference there.
The Democrats have not folded on a public healthcare "option." Actually, I can't really find anything they have folded on, at the moment. Pelosi and Reid have repeatedly said they refuse to have a bill without a "public option" though.
The American public is a lot more split than you think on healthcare, according to Gallup.
Saying one party or the other, at the moment, is at fault and doing "pure, unadulterated political brinksmanship" appears to be dependent on who you read/listen to. I try to stay out of the finger pointing, and blameshifting, as that appears to get nowhere - and Republicans and Democrats are very at fault for doing that. Right now, it seems to me that we have some very libecal Senators/House Reps that are trying to push a certain ideology.
Because there is always evidence for anyone's point, these days, and you can find economists that say the stimulus hurt and the stimulus helped the economy.
But I haven't read any that said it helped very significantly.
If you asked me what I actually thought - in my non-economist and "my macro-econ class boiled down to really complex terms for really simple ideas"-mindset opinion - I would tell you that I think it did nothing good and, if anything, some amount of bad. All it seemed to do to me is put the US government even further into debt. I know, we can't get rid of all debt...
... but according to wikipedia, the US is around 90% of GDP in debt (estimated for 2009; 70% in 2008). Also according to wikipedia, there are very few countries even above 70%. Above 70% are Hungary, Israel, Sri Lanka, Barbados, Belgium, Bhutan, Egypt, Sudan, Greece, Seychelles, Italy, Singapore, Jamaica, Lebanon, Japan, and Zimbabwe.
I read the "you don't get it, we need debt, too" comments a lot on Slashdot. My response is... they don't get it; we don't need THAT much debt, unless we want our economy to look like the economy of the ones I just listed. The only "good economy" - and actually, the only real "world power" - that I see in that list is Japan.
How the hell can you possibly expect the Democrats to fulfill their promises of bipartisanship if the Republicans do everything they possibly can to hijack the democratic process?
But the Democrats won't listen to or accept a single change to bills from Republicans, apparently, unless it is one that the Democrats all approve of in the first place.
In other words, the bipartisan effort in the Obama administration/current Senate goes something like this: Hey, why don't you just agree with us and be bipartisan?.
And if they don't agree, they are being "partisan." Or racist, for that matter.
thankfully, the grownups have taken over running this country
Ah yes. Reid and Pelosi, Axelrod, Gibbs, and even Obama at times, definitely act like grownups. Especially when they cry about Republicans not being bipartisan and then - for the first time in the history of the rule, I believe - push a bill out of committee without the quorum of two minority group members.
Actually, IMO, it seems most Senators - on both sides - act more like three year olds than what "grownups" are supposed to act like.
I guess the 70s was the conservatives' fault and the 80s and 90s were the liberals' fault? Meaning the unemployment and inflation in the 70s, and the rather good and rising economy of the 80s and 90s.
... and you conveniently overlook that it was the Bush administration that encouraged and started the stimulus spending before Obama took office.
I am a conservative and feel that Bush was a rather moderate Republican. He made mistakes and I disagreed with him a lot. And I did not overlook that he liked spending - he did, far more than I thought he would, actually. But to say that Bush is a "big spender" and "wasted" in comparison to the current administration seems to be a ridiculous statement, even from a simple look at the traditional positions of their respective parties.
It seems that Obama is still enjoying some amount of popularity based on Bush's current unpopularity... which, IMO, is an absolutely horrid reflection of the current American voter. To vote someone in simply because you hated the previous person is pretty stupid. You'd think people would want to vote someone in based on their positions, policies, history, and honesty... not based on the "other party's previous candidate."
Too bad we spend a trillion dollars invading the wrong country based on obvious lies and fabrications.
Over what, eight years?
We just spent almost a trillion in one year as a "stimulus" that has apparently helped nothing... and if it has, very little and it's really hard to tell and it appears that a lot of it is being wasted. As one economist put it, it's like taking a trillion out of your left pocket and putting it in your right pocket; no net gain. And the current administration is trying to say that it's working, but that higher unemployment is still on its way... so the economy is getting better and employment is getting worse. *scratches head*
But pardon me for interrupting your hate-Bush-more-than-anything-else party. Just wanted to mention that the current administration appears to like spending more and spending faster... and seems to like it a lot more than the previous administration... to the extent that while promising to get rid of wasteful spending, I haven't heard of a single spending cut - only dramatic increases that appear to have done negligible good...
...that Obama is really a conservative, not a liberal.
I hope you're joking...
I suppose in some very liberal circles, Obama is conservative... if you use "conservative" as a "relative" term. But you usually don't use it in a relative term without stating what it is relative to. A conservative democrat? A conservative republican? Conservative conservative?
Anyway, Obama seems to be more "populist" than anything. He won based on his popularity and charisma, not so much his liberal or conservative policies. From my viewpoint, Obama is very liberal. But then, I'm very conservative. So there you have it.
Especially sobering when you consider Adobe's current push to be essentially required as an intermediary player for anyone who wants to see certain government data.
Adobe is pushing for Flash and PDF... not Shockwave and PDF...
Yes, because now that we have raise-tax/increase-government fanatics in government that have already passed stimulus money to presumably increase work on the infrastructure, we have seen a marked increase in fixing infrastructure before it breaks.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it like a human egg and, er... a set of divine chromesomes or what? I bet some church scholar has talked about that more than any person reasonably should, it's entirely possible that got transcribed and computerized.
The Biblical texts don't comment, so I don't think many church scholars should comment on it, either. It appears to be pretty clearly stated that she was a virgin... that was the whole point of the visits to Joseph by angels, etc.
Just random though (I'm not a "church scholar," so I can comment! hehe) - if God is Biblically able to create the entire world, I'm pretty sure He would be able to fertilize a human egg (and give it actual human chromosomes) without needing one of His created men involved. If you believe in any sort of Deity that can do supernatural things, it should not be difficult to believe in a supernatural "fertilization," it seems. The part that the Bible claims that people have difficulty believing is the part about being fully divine and fully human and without sin.
by using parts of the bible people don't quote to justify slavery, stoning, and killing. As part of the essay, it uses Old Testament text that seems to justify owning slaves as long as they are not from your own country.
There are reasons for that. It's called "context."
If you want to argue whether or not slavery has ever been ok according to the Bible, that's one thing; if you want to apply what laws that the Bible states were given to a particular nation at a particular time in history for a very specific purpose to current nations and thus show how the Bible condones modern day slavery, then you have major contextual issues. It would be similar to me taking a quote from a 3rd century Greek philosopher about how Greeks back then should dress for war, applying it to modern warfare, and claiming "how stupid Greek philosophy was! They expected people to fight in their tanks with skirts!" Or whatever.
I was looking at the Closure Templates... my mistake. -1 Bad Comment. :)
Why are people investing so much in a fundamentally flawed scripting language that has almost no use at all outside the browser
Got any other [well supported] options?
extjs (and jQuery, etc) are frameworks.... Closure isn't a framework
In general, I would tend to actually agree. I disagree very strongly with Obama, but I also strongly disagree with many Republicans and conservatives in the very disrespectful way they treat him - the same disagreement I had with the many Democrats and liberals that treated Bush with the same disrespect. And hatred (on both sides/both Presidents). Obama appears to be pretty decent in his own personal actions, but I think he chooses to align himself with people that are much less dignified than he is.
And he does seem to have a tendency to not give straight/honest answers all the time, tailoring his speech and tailoring the facts to those he is talking to (e.g., his speech in Cairo). Which is more an indictment against all politicians, not just Obama... but he raised the bar on himself by claiming to be above that and wanting to change it, etc.
That was remarkably insightful.
As an aside, I happen to think this whole idea of bipartisanship is, at this point, completely absurd.
I'm really ok with non-bipartisanship, to some extent. But at least say you're not interested in it, don't try to say one thing and do another (not talking to you... talking to Washington. Who isn't reading. hehe.)
I simply don't think there *can* be any kind of bipartisan effort between the Democrats and the Republicans, simply because they're so distant ideologically.
I would tend to agree.
tearing the Democrats from power. And if that means blocking any and all attempts and meaningful reform, then so be it.
And again, I agree. Same that Democrats wanted to do. Power-struggle, pretty much, on both sides. However, I think that the current "meaningful reform" is actually bad, not good, so I'll side with Republicans at the moment.
Much like our good friend Rush Limbaugh, I really believe the Republicans hope Obama and the Democrats fail and fail miserably, regardless of the consequences it may have for America.
Limbaugh, IMO, is very smart, very arrogant, and can be very annoying (to both sides). I'm not sure most Republicans/conservatives hope Obama fails. However, I think a lot of Republicans/conservatives think that the policies Obama/Democrats are trying to put in place are bad, and thus would rather have the current administration and Congress fail sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately, I think the sentiment often goes way too far ... in that the "consequences it may have for America" are forgotten and it becomes an us-vs.-them mentality. Which is not good... and IMO, until we get honest politicians (oxymoron alert), we're going to continue to have power-struggles and corruption instead of actual good representation. I don't think the current administration nor the current Congress, for the most part - on both sides - has the non-corrupted decent-person honesty.
Anyway, to answer the charge against "Republicans" personally - I don't hope "Obama and the Democrats" (sounds like a movie, hehe) fail... but I think their policies will or would fail, and thus I would like it to happen quicker rather than later/drawn-out, if at all. I also don't think Obama is a good leader. Good PR, good campaigner, and maybe even a pretty decent guy - I don't know him personally, obviously... but I don't think he is particularly good at making hard decisions unless it gets support from everyone. If he had to make the "right choice" even if it meant being unpopular, I am not sure he would. And I don't think I agree with what he thinks is right oftentimes, either.
As for Democrats in Congress, I think most of them are pretty much bought by lobbyists. We were promised, by Obama, no pork/less-spending/more-accountability and we're getting the same amount of pork, more spending, and a lot of "czars" that don't appear to be very accountable to anyone.
Why am I rambling so long? No idea. :)
It sounded like the summary is trying to say Adobe was pushing for Shockwave to be mandatory for government-kept information access.
So, Republicans can only propose minor details, not large changes? If Republicans want, say, investigation into nuclear energy but Democrats don't, they aren't allowed to suggest it - it's too big of a change? Or too complex? Or whatever?
It seems that most of the current bills are very ideologically Democrat centered. Public healthcare and climate change stuff (but not nuclear, it seems). As I recall, House Republicans/conservatives submitted a lot of proposals from the so-called tort reform to abortion to making sure illegal immigrants don't get the public healthcare insurance option. None of them - and those are not "major" in comparison with the bill - were accepted.
Meanwhile, the Democrats have been folding on some of their core proposals in order to get things moving (a public healthcare option being the most glaring).
They folded on that? It's still in almost all of their bills, if not all of them, and it is one of the major things that many people don't want. As you mention, "60%" of the US population supports ... what? Supports healthcare reform or supports the current bills, as they are, in the House, including the public option? There's a huge difference there.
The Democrats have not folded on a public healthcare "option." Actually, I can't really find anything they have folded on, at the moment. Pelosi and Reid have repeatedly said they refuse to have a bill without a "public option" though.
The American public is a lot more split than you think on healthcare, according to Gallup.
Saying one party or the other, at the moment, is at fault and doing "pure, unadulterated political brinksmanship" appears to be dependent on who you read/listen to. I try to stay out of the finger pointing, and blameshifting, as that appears to get nowhere - and Republicans and Democrats are very at fault for doing that. Right now, it seems to me that we have some very libecal Senators/House Reps that are trying to push a certain ideology.
Because there is always evidence for anyone's point, these days, and you can find economists that say the stimulus hurt and the stimulus helped the economy.
But I haven't read any that said it helped very significantly.
If you asked me what I actually thought - in my non-economist and "my macro-econ class boiled down to really complex terms for really simple ideas"-mindset opinion - I would tell you that I think it did nothing good and, if anything, some amount of bad. All it seemed to do to me is put the US government even further into debt. I know, we can't get rid of all debt ...
... but according to wikipedia, the US is around 90% of GDP in debt (estimated for 2009; 70% in 2008). Also according to wikipedia, there are very few countries even above 70%. Above 70% are Hungary, Israel, Sri Lanka, Barbados, Belgium, Bhutan, Egypt, Sudan, Greece, Seychelles, Italy, Singapore, Jamaica, Lebanon, Japan, and Zimbabwe.
I read the "you don't get it, we need debt, too" comments a lot on Slashdot. My response is ... they don't get it; we don't need THAT much debt, unless we want our economy to look like the economy of the ones I just listed. The only "good economy" - and actually, the only real "world power" - that I see in that list is Japan.
How the hell can you possibly expect the Democrats to fulfill their promises of bipartisanship if the Republicans do everything they possibly can to hijack the democratic process?
But the Democrats won't listen to or accept a single change to bills from Republicans, apparently, unless it is one that the Democrats all approve of in the first place.
In other words, the bipartisan effort in the Obama administration/current Senate goes something like this: Hey, why don't you just agree with us and be bipartisan?.
And if they don't agree, they are being "partisan." Or racist, for that matter.
tried to keep the editorializing to a minimum
And prophesying.
thankfully, the grownups have taken over running this country
Ah yes. Reid and Pelosi, Axelrod, Gibbs, and even Obama at times, definitely act like grownups. Especially when they cry about Republicans not being bipartisan and then - for the first time in the history of the rule, I believe - push a bill out of committee without the quorum of two minority group members.
Actually, IMO, it seems most Senators - on both sides - act more like three year olds than what "grownups" are supposed to act like.
I guess the 70s was the conservatives' fault and the 80s and 90s were the liberals' fault? Meaning the unemployment and inflation in the 70s, and the rather good and rising economy of the 80s and 90s.
... and you conveniently overlook that it was the Bush administration that encouraged and started the stimulus spending before Obama took office.
I am a conservative and feel that Bush was a rather moderate Republican. He made mistakes and I disagreed with him a lot. And I did not overlook that he liked spending - he did, far more than I thought he would, actually. But to say that Bush is a "big spender" and "wasted" in comparison to the current administration seems to be a ridiculous statement, even from a simple look at the traditional positions of their respective parties.
It seems that Obama is still enjoying some amount of popularity based on Bush's current unpopularity... which, IMO, is an absolutely horrid reflection of the current American voter. To vote someone in simply because you hated the previous person is pretty stupid. You'd think people would want to vote someone in based on their positions, policies, history, and honesty... not based on the "other party's previous candidate."
I agree. I'm saying the summary is incorrect.
Too bad we spend a trillion dollars invading the wrong country based on obvious lies and fabrications.
Over what, eight years?
We just spent almost a trillion in one year as a "stimulus" that has apparently helped nothing... and if it has, very little and it's really hard to tell and it appears that a lot of it is being wasted. As one economist put it, it's like taking a trillion out of your left pocket and putting it in your right pocket; no net gain. And the current administration is trying to say that it's working, but that higher unemployment is still on its way... so the economy is getting better and employment is getting worse. *scratches head*
But pardon me for interrupting your hate-Bush-more-than-anything-else party. Just wanted to mention that the current administration appears to like spending more and spending faster... and seems to like it a lot more than the previous administration... to the extent that while promising to get rid of wasteful spending, I haven't heard of a single spending cut - only dramatic increases that appear to have done negligible good...
...that Obama is really a conservative, not a liberal.
I hope you're joking...
I suppose in some very liberal circles, Obama is conservative ... if you use "conservative" as a "relative" term. But you usually don't use it in a relative term without stating what it is relative to. A conservative democrat? A conservative republican? Conservative conservative?
Anyway, Obama seems to be more "populist" than anything. He won based on his popularity and charisma, not so much his liberal or conservative policies. From my viewpoint, Obama is very liberal. But then, I'm very conservative. So there you have it.
Especially sobering when you consider Adobe's current push to be essentially required as an intermediary player for anyone who wants to see certain government data.
Adobe is pushing for Flash and PDF... not Shockwave and PDF...
Yes, because now that we have raise-tax/increase-government fanatics in government that have already passed stimulus money to presumably increase work on the infrastructure, we have seen a marked increase in fixing infrastructure before it breaks.
Don't post anything on Facebook you aren't comfortable telling your friends, your boss, your wife, or any random stranger.
It's sad you have to tell people this.
It's like putting up fliers on telephone poles and signing your name (and picture) with it. And then asking how people found out.
You know, because we should all embrace distributions that are a pain to get working properly.
Actually, skilled people in a field seem to tend to gravitate towards the "if it's raw and not user friendly it's better" view, including Linux geeks.
Elaine obviously had bad Karma. Or did she catch it from that Threepwood guy?
With perfect, sane, always-participating people, who needs a government? ;)
I read it. Just ... lightly... hehe...